The Innocents (1961)

★★★★½ / 👍

“Sometimes one can’t help…imagining things.”

Like Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents is a masterpiece of the cinematic form that I find deeply disturbing, but not even remotely frightening. (As with Nicholson’s Jack Torrance, the psychological cracks in Kerr’s Miss Giddens, and her tendency “to be carried away quite easily,” are apparent long before she even accepts her new job.)

This is a gorgeously shot, expertly edited thriller with excellent use of sound, and filled with pitch-perfect performances. But no matter what pressure I might feel to say otherwise, I’ve quite given up on trying to convince myself that I can see anything supernatural here.